Resources

These Plans profile the tsunami-affected village, its political economy and the post-tsunami realities, aspirations and challenges of the communities. They present a community-led pre-tsunami social map, in order to establish a public documents, detailing the property ownership that existed before the tsunami.

These two CD-ROMs present a review of three yearÆs action research that has been undertaken in ActionAidÆs country programmes in Malawi and Sierra Leone. The aim of the research was to test the idea that poor communities are left outside the loop of negotiations about their own futures, because of barriers presented by language, literacy and access to those in power. The objective of the research has been to facilitate resource-poor communities to analyse and represent their own needs and priorities. Video was used by communities (in Mwakhundi, Malawi, and Freetown and Kambia, Sierra Leone) to form Community Alliances (CAs) around key issues with others like themselves. The CAs took their tapes to negotiate with government and donors. The action research tested a cyclical methodology focussed at representation through video. Each CD presents the research experiences of one of the case study countries. They include the video tapes that the CAs used to represent their needs to government and the responses they received.

This CD includes a guide to civil society engagement in advocacy on economic justice and poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSP), which aims to support civil society organisations to build their capacity to engage with economic justice issues and the PRSP process in their country. The guide adopts the PRSP approach as a framework for identifying areas for civil society engagement in advancing economic justice. The first section provides a general orientation to the PRSP process and the entry-points for civil society participation. It also assesses the quality of participation in PRSP processes to date, and provides a critique of the PRSP approach in general. The second section provides a general introduction to Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs), examples of methodologies and tools used in PPA fieldwork, highlights PPA findings, and looks at how PPAs can be linked to policy and policy making. Section three looks at the concept, rationale for, and approaches to participatory public expenditure management. It also focuses on budgets, covering issues such as transparency and participation in the budget process and the role of civil society in the budget. Tools and methods of budget analysis and advocacy are provided, as well as examples of budget work carried out by civil society organisations in various developing countries. Participatory budgeting and gender budgets are also examined. Section four provides an overview of the issues involved in the participatory monitoring and evaluation of the PRSP, looks at public expenditure tracking to ensure the effective use of allocated public funds, and the use of citizen report cards for evaluating the provision of public services. Examples are also provided of PRSP monitoring and evaluation initiatives and approaches from various countries (e.g. Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique).

This resource CD features a field tools database of 135 participatory approaches, methods and field tools developed or applied by FAO and other organisations. It also contains a selection of 215 FAO documents in English, French and/or Spanish, which have been extracted from their Participation WebsiteÆs annotated library database and sorted according to a set of different category lists. The publications are available as full-text documents either in PDF, HTML or Microsoft Word format. The CD works in a web format and includes participatory tools and literature on micro (grassroots/community), meso (district/province), and macro (national/international) levels.